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It was treeplanting that triggered environmentalist Nikki Heck’s epiphany: working in industry was the best way to make a difference.

“I got frustrated being the person putting the trees in the ground,” says Heck, 33, an environmental adviser with the electric utility company AltaLink. “I wanted to be the person making the decision about how the land was managed in the first place.”

The Calgarian was an aspiring biologist when she treeplanted during her university years. The job paid her tuition and opened her eyes.

“I knew I didn’t want to be the peon; I wanted to be making the decisions up front,” she says.

In 2004, while studying for a master’s degree in environmental design at the University of Calgary, Heck began working at AltaLink, Alberta’s main electricity transmission provider. She was still new to the job when a public report arrived about birds colliding with transmission lines near Edmonton.

Heck was sent out to investigate. “What I found was, when a bird collides with a transmission line, there’s no (power) outage, so the company doesn’t even know it happened,” she explains.

She began to research, and discovered that the impact of electricity infrastructure on birds was quite significant and virtually unknown to the Canadian electricity industry. “I was blown away by the scale of the issue.”

Collisions with the lines is a big issue, especially for water birds (ducks, geese, swans, herons and cranes); their large bodies make it difficult for them to manoeuver quickly enough to avoid an obstacle in time. There is also a risk of electrocution, for example on smaller distribution power poles where wires are close together. Birds (mostly raptors: hawks, eagles, owls) that perch on a pole can be electrocuted, usually when taking off or landing. Birds who nest on structures can also be electrocuted, though the risk is much smaller.

Heck set about creating Canada’s first Avian Protection Plan, a management system to mitigate the impact of power lines on birds. “We don’t try to keep them off,” she explains. “We try to make our facilities avian-safe.”

The plan includes numerous bird-friendly procedures and mitigations that AltaLink has implemented. To reduce bird collisions with power lines, the company installed reflective markers on lines in high-risk areas. The markers have colour patches that reflect light in the UV and colour spectrum, which makes the lines more visible to birds so they can react more quickly to avoid a collision. So far, about one third of AltaLink’s high-risk sites have been outfitted with the markers. Sites for new lines are assessed for collision risk (proximity to a wetland, for example) and are either avoided or outfitted with markers during construction.

It is not known exactly how many birds are killed annually by electricity infrastructure. A 2005 extrapolation study suggested a mortality rate of 130 million birds per year in the United States, but Heck thinks the number may be high.

AltaLink’s efforts to make its infrastructure bird-friendly also includes the installation of custom cover-ups at substations (where electricity is converted from high voltage to low voltage before it is used in homes, etc.). The cover-ups provide an insulative barrier for exposed electrical parts so that birds can safely perch on the equipment. This strategy has reduced bird electrocutions (a.k.a. “contacts”) by 95 per cent in substations where frequent contacts were occuring. But people benefit, too. Heck examined 20 years of outage data and deduced that birds caused about 20 per cent of power outages, a number that’s comparable with other utility companies across North America. Some 85 per cent of Albertans get their electricity through AltaLink transmission lines, so preventing bird contacts means fewer of us now experience power outages.

“It’s the coolest thing, it’s truly win-win,” says Heck. “We can keep the lights on for customers and we can prevent bird mortality.”

The cover-ups have already been installed in more than one quarter of AltaLink’s 280 substations in the province, helping AltaLink benefit the environment and its bottom line.

“This is a huge environmental issue that’s also costing us money,” says Heck. “Twenty per cent of your outages (that could be mitigated with simple hardware) is unacceptable.”

Heck says that the other two electrical utilities in Alberta — Atco Electric and Fortis Alberta — have followed suit since she developed the plan for AltaLink.

Her pioneering efforts to reduce bird deaths from electric utility facilities is the reason that Heck is a finalist for an Emerald Award in the individual category. Administered by the Alberta Emerald Foundation, the awards recognize outstanding commitment to environmental initiatives by Albertans.

She is grateful to work at a company “where there’s a culture of environmental protection,” and equally grateful that she gets to work with wildlife, as she’d always hoped to. “One of the things that keeps me going every day is looking at my kids,” the mother of two says. “I want them to enjoy the wild places I did as a kid. Anything I can do to protect those places is really important.”

The Alberta Emerald Foundation was founded in 1991 to promote and celebrate outstanding and innovative environmental stewardship by individuals, community groups, business, industry and government in Alberta. The Emerald Awards are its flagship initiative. This year’s winners will be revealed at a gala at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre on Thursday, June 6. The Alberta Emerald Foundation, The Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald have created a partnership to produce a series about several of this year’s finalists. Articles will appear on Saturdays until June 8.

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